In modern electronic systems and businesses the evaluation and execution of predefined processes is an important task.
With increased complexity of systems, e.g. production systems, and e.g. product or software development systems, the complexity of processes executed by or in said systems becomes higher.
In order to allow better planning and tracking of processes process descriptions are used to model said processes.
Such process descriptions comprise the process objects which are necessary to complete a process. Such process objects could for example be artefacts and roles. In such process descriptions responsibilities of roles for certain artefacts could be defined.
Some Business process management Tools, BPM-Tools, allow instantiating processes from their description and track the completion of the single process steps. For some BPM-Tools in order to allow the BPM-Tools to track the process execution the description of a process needs to include milestones of the process, artefacts needed to complete a milestone and the roles that are responsible for a certain artefact. Other BPM-Tools may work on the basis of different process objects.
For example in a software project a Milestone could be a “concept approved”, the artefacts could be a requirements document, a project plan and a program module. The roles could be “manager” and “developer”. In such a case the manager could be responsible for the requirements document and the project plan and the developer could be responsible for the program module.
Common BPM-Tools only allow assigning the responsibility for an artefact to a certain role but not to instances of a role. Therefore, in the above example, if there were two different developers they could not be individually assigned to a program module. Only all developers could be assigned to all program modules.
Accordingly, there is a need for a more flexible and granularly controllable BPM-Tool.